IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 17

provides members with 30 GB of cloud
storage and an IEEE mail account that is
linked with a Google+ membership and all
of the corresponding Google apps.
This deal with Google led to the idea
to build a custom version of Google
Groups designed to meet the needs of
the professional IEEE Member community. I'm not going to bore you with a
feature-by-feature introduction to Collabratec, but I will say that it seems to
have a lot of potential as it integrates a
bunch of Mendeley-like features and,
perhaps more interestingly, enables you
to upload your Mendeley library into a
corresponding Collabratec set of folders
and topic libraries.
But Collabratec supports a lot more
than just a set of library folders with
your research citations. It draws on the
underlying power of Google Groups to
provide an ability to set up research
communities, groups for topic-specific
researchers where collections of relevant research papers and citations can
be shared and social media tools such
as blogs and forums will empower
IEEE researchers.
One particular tool is AuthorLab,
which will allow members of a research
group to work collaboratively on a shared
research paper. The idea is to enable
researchers to explore some of the new
tools and research methodologies
described in the PoE keynote talk.
I f you have a n I E E E on l i ne
account-actually, every member has
one-then you can join Collabratec. If
you have an IEEE mail account-with
that 30 GB of free cloud storage-then
you are already authenticated for Collabratec and all you have to do is sign
in with your IEEE account credentials.
The place to go and figure this all out
is http://ieeecollabratec.org, and you
should take advantage of it, as this is
one of the free benefits of IEEE
membership.
As with all social media infrastructure, this will only be a success if people engage with it and start to use it for
practical tasks and activities. As it
becomes the hub for more IEEE activities, then the value and utility of the
network infrastructure will eventually
increase by more than an order of

How Does it Look?

FIgURE 7. IEEE Collabratec.

FIgURE 8. The AuthorLab of IEEE Collabratec.

magnitude. That is how web and network systems grow and scale.

OPEN-ACCESS PUBLICATIONS
This was a very interesting session. As
we all know, there has been a huge
growth in low-cost open-access journals and publications. These work by
charging the author to publish, and
many open-access publications also
apply professional standards of peer
review; however, many are questionable both in terms of their standards

and of the practices adopted by their
managers and editors to develop the
impact factor and citation metrics of
the journal.
Nevertheless, there was strong demand
for these journals over the past decade, but
in 2014-2015, the market appears to have
saturated. It is not exactly clear why, but
you can see from Figure 9 that growth rates
have reached a plateau, although revenue
forecasts still show a modest growth rate.
Article processing charges have stabilized, and one challenge for IEEE, as

october 2015

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

http://www.ieeecollabratec.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015